The valuation skyrocketed to $7 billion! New AI computing power rental star FluidStack is favored by Google and is the “next CoreWeave”

The Zhitong Finance App learned that according to media reports quoting information revealed by people familiar with the matter, Fluidstack, a cloud computing startup focusing on AI computing power leasing “new clouds”, is in talks to raise a new round of financing of about 700 million US dollars. After this round of financing, the company's valuation will soar to about 7 billion US dollars. This startup, which focuses on cloud AI computing power infrastructure leasing, is a typical “AI computing power infrastructure layer” player. Fluidstack's overall business logic can roughly match the cloud AI computing power rental giant CoreWeave, which has the title of “Nvidia's son”. The latter's valuation in the US stock market has reached 42.7 billion US dollars, and investors are already beginning to expect the new generation of “AI computing power arms dealer” Fluidstack to become the “next CoreWeave.”

According to media reports, the person familiar with the matter said that Situational Awareness, a company founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, is in discussions to lead this round of financing. As the information has not been made public, the person requested anonymity. According to the source, the US tech giant Google (Google), a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. is discussing participating in this round of financing, while Wall Street financial giant Goldman Sachs Group is acting as an investment bank advisor for this large-scale financing.

From a niche startup to Google backing and Macron endorsing

For a niche startup that remained relatively obscure until earlier this year, such a huge valuation highlights that in the feverish wave of building large-scale AI data centers to support artificial intelligence systems, institutional investors are rapidly pouring in to get their share of the pie.

Fluidstack, which was previously registered in the UK, recently announced plans to establish a new headquarters in New York City. It is part of a group of emerging “neoclouds” (neoclouds) companies — companies that focus on providing AI developers with one-stop fast cloud rental computing power. American tech giants, including Microsoft Corp. (Microsoft Corp.), have promised to invest huge sums of money in these relatively unknown data centers or AI application startups to bolster their computing resources.

Fluidstack has reached two major deals with Google so far this year. The startup agreed to co-develop a large-scale AI data center with two cryptocurrency mining companies, TeraWulf Inc. and Cipher Mining Inc. These transactions were completed through debt financing. In both major deals, Google acted as a “backstop” (backstop) — agreeing to pay creditors in the event of Fluidstack's default or bankruptcy.

For the Bitcoin mining companies mentioned above, the computing power infrastructure that once focused on mining can be described as being perfectly suited to the data center computing power resources required for AI training/inference, and mining companies already have other infrastructure such as connected networks, substations, land resources, and power distribution, which can adapt to large-scale AI workloads in a very short period of time.

These arrangements highlight the growing complexity of the path businesses take to finance data centers. Facebook's parent company Meta Platforms Inc. has raised about $60 billion to build a data center, half of which does not appear as debt on the company's balance sheet.

FluidStack is also a key part of French President Emmanuel Macron's AI promise earlier this year. In February, Fluidstack announced plans to build a “super artificial intelligence computer” with a cost of 10 billion euros (about 11.5 billion US dollars) and a capacity of 1 gigawatt in France, which is expected to be launched in 2026.

Some media previously reported that at that point in time, the startup was in discussions with investors to raise up to 200 million US dollars.

The Information reported earlier on Thursday that Fluidstack is currently seeking to raise more than 700 million US dollars, and Situational Awareness is in talks to lead this round of financing.

According to its official website, Fluidstack's partners include Meta, Honeywell International Inc. (Honeywell International Inc.), and many well-known AI startups.

How sacred is Fluidstack?

Fluidstack is a “new cloud” player on the AI data center & computing power rental circuit. This round talks about a valuation of 7 billion US dollars, which is not only the epitome of the unprecedented AI computing infrastructure frenzy that has taken the world by storm, but also means that it has rapidly transitioned from being an undertaker of small AI infrastructure projects from Europe to one of the core pawns in the grand narrative of global AI infrastructure capital.

Fluidstack is a startup that focuses on data center construction and cloud computing power leasing. It is not a chip or a public cloud portal in the true sense of the word, but rather lays out, constructs, and operates large-scale data centers around the world (including deep cooperation with crypto mining companies TeraWolf and Cipher Mining to completely transform these Bitcoin mining companies' data centers into large-scale AI data centers suitable for AI training/inference); then leases part of the AI computing infrastructure to companies that develop AI applications in the form of cloud leasing — including Big companies such as Microsoft and AI startups such as OpenAI.

In the latest round of financing, Fluidstack is negotiating about $700 million in financing, corresponding to a valuation of about $7 billion; around the beginning of the year, the AI startup was reported to be negotiating up to about $200 million in financing with investors, but the exact valuation was not disclosed at the time — however, some media revealed that the financing scale at the time was far less than the $7 billion valuation in the current round of financing.

The funding scale itself has soared sharply from a maximum of $200 million to about $700 million, and the funding volume alone has increased by more than 3 times; currently, the $7 billion valuation indicates that it has moved from being an “obscure player with hundreds of millions of dollars” to a typical “AI infrastructure unicorn +” range — that is, the valuation level has moved into a “multi-billion dollar new cloud infrastructure platform+AI computing power rental unicorn platform.”

Judging from the information already disclosed, Fluidstack and “Nvidia's son” CoreWeave business models are highly similar. The core is all centered around AI training/inference to provide AI computing power infrastructure based on a cloud-based rental system, rather than a general public cloud.

As the earliest cloud leasing user of Nvidia's graphics processor (GPU) in the data center field, CoreWeave won the favor of Nvidia's venture capital department by seizing the wave of demand for data center AI computing power resources, and was even able to prioritize the extremely high demand Nvidia H100/H200 and Blackwell series AI GPUs, which forced cloud service giants such as Microsoft to rent cloud AI computing power resources from CoreWeave.

The current global demand for AI computing power resources has undoubtedly continued to explode. This is why the valuations of cloud AI computing power leasing leaders such as Fluidstack and CoreWeave have continued to expand since this year. AI computing power resource requirements, which are closely related to AI training/inference, have pushed the capacity that the underlying computing power infrastructure clusters can meet to the limit, and even large-scale AI data centers that have continued to expand recently cannot meet the extremely strong computing power demand on a global scale.

After Google launched the Gemini 3 AI application ecosystem in late November, this cutting-edge AI application immediately became popular all over the world, driving an instant surge in demand for Google's AI computing power. Once released, Gemini3 series products brought huge AI token processing capacity, forcing Google to drastically reduce the amount of free access to Gemini 3 Pro and Nano Banana Pro, and also imposed temporary restrictions on Pro subscribers. Combined with South Korea's recent trade export data, demand for HBM storage systems and enterprise-grade SSDs continues to be strong, further verifying that “the AI boom is still in the early stages of construction where computing power infrastructure is in short supply.”